ktravula – a travelogue!

reflections on the world

Browsing the archives for the Soliloquy category.

The Third Winter

Browning tar, a rote of car zoom noises around my window. The sun sets in a distance, a lot earlier than before, to a now conditioned amazement. Afternoon and night share a neighbourly block on the street of a dying year. Tick, tock, the clock hand counts the moments again in memories of times gone before. At a different time but in a similar pose, time counted down. The geese quacked. The refrigerator hummed creaky tunes in the middle of night. Ice formed into layers of sweat balls around the glass, and everything else stayed still.

The world has not changed since then, or has it? Many months of movements follow each other in steps of ease, and texts, and work, and revolts. And here we are, another winter, another dark evening at four o’ clock. It is a short remove from those quiet times, just two years ago, in the sober remove of a rustic village, but here it is. A year winds down with the last paces of its easing rote, crank and all.

 

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The Third Winter was published on December 18th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

On Poetry as Science

One piece of prose floating from the fading memory I have from reading Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay occasionally come back to haunt me in my still moments. It asks amidst a whole lot of other questions what the purpose of words are beyond their ability to convey meanings. In one recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson compares the inconsequentiality of our presence on this planet to that of a billion (and some) bacteria living in the walls of our intestines whose number is equal to almost three times the number of all human life that ever existed and died. Like those bacteria, he suggests, who live without the mental capability of understanding the dimension of their inconsequentiality when compared to six billion other intestines walking the earth (with the multibillion units of bacteria they carry in them), we may not possess the mental flexibility to understand our insignificance (along with our equally possible random relevance as evidenced by our current existence).

Milosz asks as if to himself what makes it so that words, in their utmost insignificance beyond immediate use, lends themselves to entendres, rhyme and poetry. Did there exist on some magical plane a predestination for the word “apple” to become the symbol of ultimate taboo, pleasure and sin? In which realm of serendipity did “gain” and “pain” acquire the paradox of their rhyming complementarity. Sure computers may not write poems now (and I have no doubt that this is false), but the lexical matrix of today’s world endows us with a gazillion ways of expressing thoughts in inventive ways. The order in which I have written the last couple of sentences in this post (with almost a 100% certainty) is an order in which these words have never ever been arranged and never will anymore by anyone else. There is something to that. The process of writing poetry, for me, taps into the science of this randomness. The art resides in the chance of success – that moment when meaning, form, and words meet at the tip of the writer’s hands. See below:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

from W.B. Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

This concise beauty, and an underlying deceptive simplicity that wows, has always defined for me one of writing’s unreachable bars; the place where science, art and meaning collide with the earnest needs of the present.

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On Poetry as Science was published on December 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Art, Observations, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

A World In Intolerance

Saturday evening found me in a bar downtown Edwardsville for a quick drink. One particular conversation with a mere acquaintance present there with a few other friends eventually turned to discussion about careers, mine, and about what I would like to be doing as soon as I’m done with a Master’s degree. It then returned to him and what he was doing at the moment. He’s studying to be a health scientist and he would one day love to work on the African continent. “I would have gone to Ghana in the summer,” he said, “but I didn’t have the money”. “Great,” I replied. “I know a program called the Global Health Corps which sponsors interested health workers/scholars from the United States to parts of Africa in order to make a difference doing what they love. It’s fully funded, and it’s perhaps precisely what you need. As a matter of fact, my fiance lives in Uganda at the moment because of this program.” He was immediately enthusiastic for one second, and then stopped. “I can’t go to Uganda, Kola. They’d hang me there.”

It took me about two seconds, and then I got it. He is gay. This was my first time of hearing this admission directly from him. He was apparently already familiar with the laws in many states on the continent today demonizing that kind of difference. I recovered from my double-take and tried to assure him. “You’re a foreigner. Foreigners are usually more protected especially when they’re volunteering… Maybe your presence in local communities saving lives will be enough to help change minds… Or maybe you don’t have to wear the tag on your forehead…” No, he said. He doesn’t have anything to hide and would never live where he is forced to deny who he is. The conversation went on for a little while more with me asking a few more questions I’d always wanted to know from a self-declared homosexual: How long has he known? Has he ever kissed a girl and loved it? Has he ever had sex with a girl? etc It was surprisingly an open conversation without any awkward moments where the young man opened up with his fears, hope, dreams and pain at the kind of society that demonizes difference. I expressed my empathy to him, just a few seconds before I informed him that he wouldn’t be able to live in Nigeria either.

A few days ago, last week, a  new law was passed by Nigeria’s Senators penalizing “homosexual activity” for up to 14 years in jail, and up to 10 years for those who support, conduct or witness homosexual marriages and association. Many things make this law stupid, but this makes it curiously draconian: there has never been a clamour for homosexual union/marriage in Nigeria. If anything, the derisive societal attitude has been previously enough to keep those with same-sex attraction in the closet. Societal acceptance – if it ever happened – would have been a very big leap forward. Many pundits have already written about this, and the conversation about the scourge of this state-sanctioned intolerance has already taken centre stage in the media, which is good. Looking through the various arguments put forward by citizen for the support of this legislative measure has however convinced me of the long way that society still need to go to overcome intolerance.

Back to America, at around the same day, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman of the United States House of Representatives was telling a group of voters that she has no problems with homosexuals or lesbians getting married, as long as they get married to people of the opposite sex. Read it here. Here is the summary then: If you live in Nigeria or in the US as a gay person, you risk being criminalized except you get married – to the people you are not attracted to. If you live in Uganda, there’s one step further, you may be brutally murdered by a mob of intolerant activists (as was the case of the human right activist David Kato). There is much more to say about the hypocrisy of these expressions of sadistic intolerance, but I will end this post here – a minor contribution to the dialogue. There are a lot more we can do to bring peace to the world than spending time demonizing other people because they are different from us. A lot more things we can do with our conscientious energy.

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A World In Intolerance was published on December 5th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Occupation Blues

Open window peers into a blue evening through tiny louvre slits,

removed, it seems, from floods around the Nile and the Hudson,

Mississippi, Missouri and Victoria and other throbbing tributaries.

 

Open veins of revolt, serrated slivers of soul across the landscape

as far as eyes could see: a finger in the pupil of the surly present.

“Occupy this,” morning calls, blue with equal promises of dawn.

 

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Occupation Blues was published on November 20th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Across from me, Dawning.

Waking up to the soft silence of fall, there is a magic unspoken. Trees bob light heads in the kindness of the wind. Yellow leaves blow around a once lonely place. The ground lay spread on a terrace of rust. Through the solid glass where the traveller looks out into the backyard, the season floats in the air like a dream of a faraway land. The snap, crackle of dry broken stems could only break the silences. They rarely shake the shape of the morning out of the serene lure of its affection. Morning breaks into the rote of rust. It brings with it silence, crackles of dry slivers of life across the dawning day.

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Across from me, Dawning. was published on November 14th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

GOP Foreign Policy Debate

The latest GOP debate has just ended, with its illuminating moments. It’s one of those times when I had much to do but preferred to spend the time unwinding in front of my computer and television, with another finger on twitter. The United States foreign policy matters to everyone in the world since whoever gets to become president has to sit behind a desk with access to codes that can send nuclear bombs halfway across the world.

In spite of the aggravation I found myself experiencing at different times in the debate when candidates spouted sound bites to rounds of applause, I realize now that it was an important debate. For one, it showed the marked differences between all the men that want to sit in the position of the current president. Governor Romney wants to have a trade war with China. Governor Perry wants to scale back all foreign donations to zero, and Mr. Cain doesn’t have an idea about whether Pakistan is a friend or a foe, and Rep Bachman thinks that everyone wants to blow Israel up with nuclear weapons. I also realize how easy it is from this removed position of mine to scoff their foibles many of which stem from their inability to recognize the complexity of world politics.

In any case, this other news caught my attention and should probably keep me interested in US foreign policy interest for the next couple of weeks.

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GOP Foreign Policy Debate was published on November 12th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

A Changing Country

When, two to three decades from now, I am sitting in my office, study or at a family dinner table looking back to my days in the United States, one of the things I will cherish the most is the opportunity to have been here to witness pivotal moments of notable changes, when a new fresh nation was born out of a tired vestige of the old.

From what I read, the last time something as significant as a popular uprising by citizens to demand change came about was in the 60s during the civil rights movement. From what we see around every day these days, those days – or at least something close to it and equally significant - are back. It showed itself first through the Tea Party movements in 2009, and now through the message of the Occupy ____ protesters that have taken their message to major cities around America.

I was privileged to sit through one of the first sessions of the Occupy Edwardsville meetings today on campus. The movement which started as a reaction to the Oligarchy of Wall Street and unfair income disparity in the country has spread all around the country and is beginning to embody the disenchantment that most people feel about the direction of the country. Today’s event, being campus based, was more educational and brain-storming than anything else, but it was not any less significant.

I do not know a full list of their demands, but one of the major recent successes of the movement so far has been to force the Bank of America to reverse its decision to charge card users $5 monthly for debit card use. Another one is to change the national conversation from shrinking the government size to equitable living opportunities. Today’s meeting was open and democratic, allowing members and spectators ask questions and participate in brainstorming sessions to fashion reasonable and workable manifesto. I saw some professors in the crowd as well as students. At the back of the gathering were two cops standing and paying attention.

American politics, I have found, is one of the most fascinating in the world. This citizen opportunity for social and political change through a democratic means is not only stimulating, it is one of the country’s most admirable characteristics. All of this play out even in spite of obvious regrettable consequences of all mass action: infiltration by anarchists who want everything to fall apart as soon as possible, to no known end.

I see a new country emerging – as it always does season after season, and I again find myself tied to it. The news of my coming here got to me on the same day that the country elected its first black president. Being here at the crossroads of its changing environment provides for me a boon: a vantage point from which to contemplate the past and the present, while interacting with a new dynamic future of which I now find myself an integral part.

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A Changing Country was published on November 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Go Cardinals!

The last in the 2011 American World Series games will take place tonight. The St. Louis Cardinals are playing with the Texas Rangers. I support the Cardinals, of course, not only because they’re our team, but because they have come back with resilience in each game where they’ve been written off. Whoever wins today’s game will become the “World” Champions. Why shouldn’t it be the Cardinals?

Here’s another conceit: maybe Governor Rick Perry of Texas will reconsider running for president if his team loses. I’m kidding, of course. :)

Go Redbirds!

Update: We Won!!! The Cardinals are the World Champions!

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Go Cardinals! was published on October 28th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Fun, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

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